


The Fixed Foot

by sophiagratia



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Episode: s07e18 Heroes (2), F/F, Femslash, Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-13
Updated: 2011-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-20 09:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiagratia/pseuds/sophiagratia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack learns too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fixed Foot

_Our two souls therefore, which are one,  
Though I must go, endure not yet  
A breach, but an expansion,  
Like gold to airy thinness beat._

 _If they be two, they are two so,  
As stiff twin compasses are two,  
Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show  
To move, but doth, if the other do. _  
\-- John Donne, ‘A Valediction : forbidding Mourning’

*

Jack doesn’t know what to do with the chaos of emotion that surrounds him. He wanders the base in his dress blues, feeling displaced, seeking some purpose to his movements and finding none.

He can’t account for the weight of his grief. He hardly knew Janet Fraiser, and he’s almost ready to admit to himself that it’s only because he didn’t try. That the real sense of this loss is his own failure to know her.

He wanders through Carter’s lab. Who knows where she is. The memorial – Christ almighty, her best friend’s memorial – was maybe too much for her. She’s gone home, maybe. He’ll call her later. Maybe.

But he pauses in her lab, looking for proximity to her, to share with her even in remote silence this burden of feeling he dislikes.

He trails his fingers along her table, cocks an uneasy glance at her machines and scattered specs and crumpled notes of calculations. He shakes off the sudden sense that he’s lost her, too.

A book on the floor stops him short. He bends and picks it up. Battered boards, coarse paper. Poetry. That’s unusual. He thinks it’s unusual. But he’s also been wondering, lately, how much he doesn’t know about his second-in-command. So maybe not.

There’s a sheet of paper folded between the pages. He thinks twice about it, or so he’ll later tell himself, but he unfolds it. It’s a draft of the words Carter has just spoken, in the gateroom. He doesn’t like that his hand shakes, just a little, when he sees that. He turns it over, and there’s something else on the back.

He reads before he thinks not to. _She was the fixed foot. We wandered, and she stayed._ It’s a little fevered, a little incoherent. The hand is uneven, not the familiar clear and careful of the litany of names on the other side.

 _She was my home._ He realizes too late that what he’s reading is what Carter wished she could say but didn’t dare. The true reason she’d had trouble finding words, her secret eulogy for Janet. And he hates himself for it, but he can’t make himself put it down.

*

 _She was the fixed foot._

 _We wandered, and she stayed. She brought us home, every one of us, every day. What you know, all of you, is that you broke yourselves walking on other worlds, and that she was here when you walked home again to put you back together._

 _You don’t know how much you don’t know. You don’t know how firmly fixed she was._

 _Janet Fraiser was your healer and your hero. But she was my home._

 _She was strong enough to hold me still. I would have run from her, but she – fixed firm, feet planted on the solid earth – she loved me anyway. She held me still. She resolved my fear. She made room for me when it was the last thing I deserved._

 _She smiled at me in the morning._

 _And she made love to me. She made love to me. She made love to me._

 _I will never be able to say it aloud to you, but she was my lover for three years and twenty-seven days._

 _You saw our minds in step. Our bodies and our lives were, too. She shared her home and her table and her bed with me. We raised a child together. She taught me what it means to have a partner, and to be one._

 _She was the fixed foot. For three years and twenty-seven days, I didn’t wander. I circled her. Walking through the Stargate to a new world was for me only describing a new radius defined by the fixity of Janet Fraiser. In our unsteady quantum world, the clear geometry of her pointed me home. Every day._

 _You commend her today for heroism. I commend that, too. But I also know what you will never know. Valor in the line of duty has nothing on the private courage of her heart._

 _She was the fixed foot._

*

It ends in an angry, inarticulate scrawl. He makes out the word _wandering_ and maybe _again_ , or _alone_.

His hands are shaking in earnest now, and he doesn’t begin to try denying it. ‘The fixed foot,’ he whispers raggedly to himself.

He hears a sharply drawn breath behind him, and he whirls. Carter has crept in, under cover of the daze that overtook him as he read. The look in her eyes sends the paper flying from his hands. She’s pale as the walls and unsteady on her feet. He falters.

‘Hey,’ he says stupidly. Anger and fear compete with something else in her expression. She says nothing. He leans against the table for stability.

‘Sam,’ he says at last. ‘I am so sorry.’

Sorry for breaking her trust, for reading what he shouldn’t have. Sorry that he knows what he shouldn’t. Sorry that she couldn’t tell him. Sorry that he didn’t know without being told. Sorry that she's lost her lover. Her fixed foot. Christ almighty.

‘Sir –’ she starts, before her voice breaks.

He doesn’t hesitate, for once. He crosses the room and lets her fall on him. He can tell by the way she falls that she wraps her arms around his neck only because her knees have buckled and she’s sobbing fit to choke herself.

She’s angry, and she should be. But there will be time later for anger and for having it out. For now, his arms are what she has. If he holds her tightly enough, he thinks outrageously, if he’s strong enough, he can take her sorrow from her, bear it for her. He can’t. Of course, he can’t. But he holds her all the same, if only to keep her off the floor.

Maybe he can’t be a center for her to circle. But he can stand here with her, and he can wander with her, until she finds something else to point her home. So, he thinks, murmuring against her hair, holding her and her sorrow, that is exactly what he will do.

*


End file.
